Monday, July 14, 2014

Deborah Rix

Welcome to Dystopian High

I didn’t set out to write a dystopian
story, but once I imagined teenagers in a not-too-distant future I don’t think
it could have been otherwise. Dystopian stories can seem to be about wildly
imaginative yet impossible futures, but they are really a version of what is
happening in teenage lives right now.

The world is a nice enough place (if
you live in the first world,) most decisions are made by others, and the future
is a bright and shiny place. But, along comes high school and teenagers are
questioning rules that suddenly seem arbitrary and can randomly change. Their
bodies are no longer under their control and seem to operate independently from
their brains. They are watched, assessed, and assigned to a social group they
may or may not want to be a part of. Adults are constantly monitoring
communication channels, and nonconformity attracts bullies. No one cares who
they really are, even though they themselves haven’t quite figured out who they
are yet.

And then they discover the Big Lie.
There are things going on that no one told them about, and there are places in
the world that, for good or ill, are utterly different from their own
existence. They realize that it’s their turn to change the world.

Plus, kissing.

Reimagine all of that and you end up
with young adult dystopian fiction.

My reimagining began with Scientific
American. It has fascinating articles
from every branch of scientific discovery. It also has a lot of bad news. Well,
potential bad news. I began to ask myself what would happen if those dire
warnings came true, or if those breakthroughs led to something unexpected.

What if scientific theory could be
challenged and declared untrue by people with no scientific background? What if
Creationists gained political power?
What if big pharmaceutical companies ran the American FDA and approved
whatever they wanted to? What if all those potential problems with genetically
modified food actually happened? What if genetic information was collected
during a vaccination program from an unsuspecting population under the guise of
national security? What if all the pollinating bees began inexplicably
disappearing, threatening food crops? What if there was mass starvation and
genocide on the other side of the world and we didn’t do anything about it?
What if personal privacy was eradicated and all of our communication was
monitored?

All of those things have recently
occurred in some form; my imagination only had to take it one step further. And
I have to say, it was hard to stay ahead of developments because the future
kept catching up with me as I was writing.

None of those possibilities could
cause TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) on their own, but what if
they happened all at once? What if TEOTWAWKI comes not as an apocalyptic bang,
but instead we watch it arrive without giving the slightest whimper?

Reimagine all of that, and, again, we
end up with dystopian fiction, the sort that likes to warn us of the
consequences of staying calm and carrying on. If those teenagers out there don’t
stop and turn things around for us, this is how the future could turn out.